JERUSALEM—Israel’s President Reuven Rivlin met with the family of Mireille Knoll, the 85-year-old woman who was murdered in a brutal anti-Semitic knife attack at her home in Paris last March.
The meeting took place at the President’s Residence in Jerusalem.
Mireille Knol was a Holocaust survivor. As a child she narrowly escaped France’s most notorious wartime roundup of Jews in Paris when, in the summer of 1942, the French police, cooperating with the Germans, rounded up thousands of the city’s Jews, stuffing them into a cycling stadium, the Vélodrome d’Hiver. All were subsequently murdered at Auschwitz.
Knoll’s murder has been officially described by French authorities as an anti-Semitic hate crime.
Mireille Knoll’s assailants entered her apartment in Paris’ 11th arrondissement and reportedly stabbed Knoll 11 times before setting her on fire. The older suspect told investigators that the younger suspect asserted “She’s a Jew. She must have money.” One shouted “allahu Akbar‘ as they stabbed her.
The Paris prosecutor’s office said she had been killed because of the “membership, real or supposed, of the victim of a particular religion” — a roundabout way of saying she was killed because she was Jewish.
Mireille Knoll’s family is establishing a Foundation in her memory, based on the principles of tolerance and solidarity.
President Rivlin warmly embraced Mireille’s son, Daniel, and her granddaughters. “Your loss is so painful that there are hardly words to express it. Having survived the horrors of the Holocaust as a child, your mother and grandmother returned to Paris, her home. But the same hatred that pursued her as a child did not disappear. We must be clear – there can be no tolerance for anti-Semitism in any form, or for any kind of discrimination or hatred.”